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Monday, December 18, 2006

I think its rather telling of the album's quality when I think that the Dears' 2006 release, Gang of Losers, is quite possibly their best work to date. It's even more impressive when I look back over the Dears' back catalog, their anthemic debut End of a Hollywood Bedtime Story, their somber and ornate Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique ep, their new wave tinged early demo Nor The Dahlias: 1995-1998, their experimental and emotional Protest ep, their sweeping cinematic hit album No Cities Left and various demos, b-sides, and live unreleased songs along the way. And what really shocked me when I looked back over all that Dears material as I looked back on it was that there was not one single song that I disliked. Not a single stinker. Sure, the three Protest songs aren’t as fulfilling on their own as they are together, and yes, the video for OPNR's "Autonomy" is rather dull, but so is the video for Cornelius's "Gum" which is a delightful blast of energy when listened to without visuals.

Which is why it pains me so that Gang of Losers's very first track, "Sinthro", is utter crap, 90-seconds of warm twinkling keys cooing for attention and all it does is make me want to turn the damn thing off. "Sinthro" is 2006's answer to last year’s "Clap Your Hands!" from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's self-titled album, an offensive introduction that makes you want to snap the cd in half, but you already know you love the band and you've already heard one of two songs on the album and know they're brilliant, so you just grit your teeth, hit fast forward to the next track, and pretend that horrible moment of pretentious introduction never happened. Thankfully, that's why there are checkboxes in iTunes, so my listening experience can begin properly, with the much more worthy "Ticket to Immorality", the first of many tracks on the album to pass what I call the Picaresque test, named for the Decemberists album, wherein the songs themselves sound like typical fair for the band, if not better, but the choruses are instantly transformed into bedroom-contained singalongs. I can't not sing along with Murray as he croons "I hang out with all the pariahs. Everyone is almost done with you," and "the world is really gonna love you!" which seems a welcome follow-up to the previous album's first song ("We Can Have It") and its similar cries of "you're not alone!" and chanting "it won't ever be what we want."

The aforementioned "you're not alone!" was easily my favorite musical moment of 2003 (when I imported the Canadian release, two years before the rest of the world suddenly fell in love with the reissue, which was missing a track and had decidedly more lame artwork), and there are similar song-stopping moments of grandeur to be found in Gang of Losers, most notably on "Bandwagoneers" when Murray hollers "I'm trying to remember when we had control, when we let it go!" You can almost feel the hammer of the song's metaphorical pistol cock.

The album is at its most rocking with "Death or Life We Want You" and its most hipster poetically beautiful with "There Goes My Outfit". If you're not completely sold when everything but the acoustic guitar and tambourine drop out at the 3:25 mark of "You And I are a Gang of Losers" where (primarily) the girls coo "we...we've got the same heart" then you just don't have a soul.

The true sign of success for Gang of Losers came back in August when I played it for my friend Dan, who shares similar tastes in everything as I, but is extremely reluctant to anything I try to introduce to him (he hated Bloc Party when I first played "Banquet" for him, and now its two years later and he’s all over Silent Alarm). It played pleasantly in the background as we talked about other things for the first eight minutes. Then, about halfway through "Hate Then Love" he said "this is very The Bends-ian (referring to the seminal Radiohead album which Dan worships), who is it?" and I responded "it's the new the Dears record," and Dan, with the glint in the corner of his eye trying to suppress the fact that he refused to listen to No Cities Left all those years ago let out a very casual "cool. I like it."

10:17 AM
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